For violins, it has to be the best spruce and maple. For top-class clarinets, you need African Blackwood or grenadilla. And for a really good ice trumpet, only natural ice will do. “The ice you get from ice-making machines looks perfect but it’s no good for music,” says Terje Isungset, the Norwegian experimental composer whose Ice Music is about to receive its UK premiere. “The best ice I ever found comes from glaciers in the far north of Sweden.”

He should know. Isungset has been obsessed with ice instruments ever since an epiphanic moment 11 years ago. He was standing in a huge cave-like space behind a frozen waterfall in northern Norway, which had been turned into a concert venue for a festival of experimental music. He was busy assembling his usual array of exotic instruments when he realized that hanging in great glinting shards above his head was something that might be useful. “I had often thought about using ice in my performances,” he says, “and finally I had the opportunity to try it out.”

The results astonished him. “I had no idea ice could sound so beautiful. I could hear tones and sounds that I had never heard before. I was so eager to explore this new source, I didn’t have time to eat or sleep.”

Now London audiences can hear Isungset’s extraordinary music as part of an installation opening tomorrow at Somerset House. Entitled The Idea of North, the installation evokes the mystique of the idea of the extreme North. Originally commissioned by Opera North, it brings together Isungset’s music with images of vast, empty northern landscapes assembled by film-maker Phil Slocombe.

Isungset is one of a whole school of Norwegian musicians who have been inspired by the stark quality of their own northern landscape, but only he goes as far incorporating objects found in the landscape itself. Anyone attending one of Isungset’s concerts will be faced with a bizarre menagerie of noise-making objects: driftwood, bark, stones, rocks. Tucked inside them there’ll be a drum-kit, strangely mottled as if it’s been left out in the rain for decades.

How did a percussionist who started off playing alongside his accordionist father in dance bands end up in the wilder fringes of experimental music? “Because I realised that everything I was doing was just repeating something I had heard before,” says Isungset in his mild, very quiet way. “I could play in every style, but nothing was truly mine. So in my mid-twenties I stopped playing and started learning from scratch.”

This “learning” was as much negative as positive. Isungset had to shed his acquired technique and all familiar notions of what music is. He went for long walks in the woods outside his house outside Bergen, trying out materials. “I would listen out for sounds, and when I heard something interesting I would find the source and carry it home!”

News of his experiments travelled, and invitations came to create new pieces, often at specific sites where the local sounds would become part of the performance.

Then came the joyous discovery of ice, since when this quintessentially northern substance has become central to Isungset’s work. In 2006 he created an annual Icemusic Festival on a mountainside at Geilo in Norway. And he’s also recorded an album of Winter Songs, which involved various ice instruments of his own invention – including an ice trumpet – and the singer Lena Nymark.

It’s the sixth release on Isungset’s own label, All Ice Records, which is dedicated to music made entirely on ice instruments. The sounds are astoundingly pure, almost flutey. They’re also surprisingly euphonious, falling often into familiar major and minor chords.

Songs from this album will be woven into the live performances taking place alongside the installation, which is itself accompanied by pre-recorded “ice music” also created by Isungset. For obvious reasons the performances have to be short. “I am preparing a number of instruments for the performances here in Bergen, and of course I have to make lots of spare ones, because there are always breakages. After each performance the instruments have to go straight back into the deep freeze.”

Though the sounds are beautiful, Isungset feels the real value of “ice music” goes beyond its aural magic. “For me, music is to do with following what nature suggests. I want to find out what these stones and rocks and pieces of ice are trying to say to me. That is why I like to return the materials to nature after I have used them, because they don’t belong to me, they are just on loan. I think human beings are really really small, and not important at all. The earth existed millions of years before we arrived, and will exist for millions of years afterwards. I really hope my music makes people aware of this.”

The Idea of North and Ice Music, produced by sounduk, are at Somerset House, London WC2, Jan 7-9. Details: www.somersethouse.org.uk